Günther Anders (Stern)—first husband of Hannah Arendt; second cousin of Walter Benjamin; student of Husserl and Heidegger; roommate of Marcuse; friend of Brecht; rival of Adorno; attendant of Kojève’s lectures in Paris; co-translator with Levinas; antifascist novelist; anti-atomic-bomb activist; philosopher of technology, of apocalypse, of the antiquatedness of human beings; composer; script-writer; costume designer; a Jew who resigned from the Jewish community; a member of the 1967 International War Crimes Tribunal (alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and Stokely Carmichael) which condemned the war in Vietnam as genocide—died penniless in Vienna next to Freud’s office in 1992.

No new demands can bridge the gap of lost meaning, no new values can patch up the moral deficit, no new party can fill the void at the center of politics, for the gap itself is now occluded by time.

In Autumn 1944, amidst abominable horrors occurring in Europe, Theodor Adorno penned the following paragraph, later to be included in Minima Moralia in a section called “Out of the Firing-Line”

The force behind these trends is the growing centrality of urban real estate to capital’s global growth strategy. Through this process, the price of land becomes a central economic determinate and a dominant political issue.

Nina Scholz is a journalist who works for Deutschlandradio, taz, Freitag, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Analyse & Kritik, and more, with a focus on the digital economy, labor struggles, and leftist movements. Her book Nerds, Geeks and Pirates: Digital Natives in Culture and Politics, was published in 2014 by Bertz und Fischer Verlag. She is active in the Deutsche Wohnen & Co Enteignen campaign. Jacob Blumenfeld interviewed her in Berlin.

Jeff VanderMeer writes weird fiction and eco-fiction. He also edits science fiction, horror, and fantasy anthologies with his partner, Ann VanderMeer.